5 Tips for Accelerating at Your New Sales Role!

Sales is still the dominant field where someone with or without an education and experience can chase after their dream of financial success in any number of industries carving a new path for their career. This advice today is more for the junior salesperson or someone who has recently decided to pivot to a career in sales.

The five tips for accelerating at your new sales role are aim to master the fundamentals, embrace digital tools, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, get an A+ at the easy things, and be bold.

Aim to Master the Fundamentals

On day one its important to hit the ground running, learning everything you can about the fundamentals of sales, business development, and/or account management (depending on your role). This might mean learning from an existing training program or having to learn 100% on your own.

The good thing is that there are thousands of books, YouTube channels, and podcasts that can help you get a head start. I would highly recommend exploiting as many of those as you can. Reading a book like “How to Master the Art of Selling” by Tom Hopkins, as well as cruising YouTube to find some sales influencers that can provide quick video clips of free sales training will help begin your initial journey on the right foot.

Embrace Digital Tools

These days there are a lot of digital tools that can help you make an impact and achieve results in sales. Learning tools like Zoom for meetings, Calendly for booking 1:1 appointments automatically, customer relationship management software (CRM) to help automate your prospect follow-up process and track sales opportunities, and utilizing networking tools like LinkedIn will all help you become a success in modern day sales roles. These tools can all act as a “force multiplier” for your sales growth.

Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast

Focus on learning strategies and tactics that are simple and repeatable while laying a foundation for go-to-market success at your new role. Think of your first 90 or 180 days as a pilot program and you are conducting a proving ground for how you’re going to be successful long-term, and later scale your success in years to come.

Get an A+ at the Easy Things

It’s important to know that there are easy things you can get an A+ in right out of the gate as someone completely new to sales. These high impact areas are to 1) always be a positive brand ambassador when speaking about your company, job, or coworkers, 2) deliver A+ customer service showing up for meetings on time and resolving customer problems quickly, 3) deliver on your customer promises to gain credibility and grow relationships fast, and finally 4) dress for success and speak confidently to prospects and clients.

Be Bold

It’s important to know that at most jobs in sales you will be viewed as expendable initially until you prove yourself. Results are what will keep your job, and results only. Most sales jobs are cutthroat expecting revenue results within your first 90 to 180 days. It’s important to be bold with your planning and execution.

By being bold, I mean that you may see opportunities that your boss doesn’t. At the end of the day, you want to keep good favor with your sales manager. However, success might actually look like staying on good terms with him, and ignoring his advice sometimes, putting your head down and making the vision you see and path towards success realized.

Know that I’m not encouraging you to be disobedient. But a lot of sales people lose there job by only following instructions from their managers. Sometimes you have to take initiative, think outside of the box, hustle, and go after what you see could bring success quickly at your new sales job. Be brave.

I hope you have found this helpful. If you are considering a job in sales or a career pivot, you can schedule a 1:1 coaching session with me here.